


Amputation

by missclairebelle



Series: miss clairebelle imagine prompts [6]
Category: Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, The Fiery Cross, lots and lots of angst, missing moment, snakebite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-14 22:11:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20608157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: A missing moment from The Fiery Cross when Claire and Bree discuss amputation following Jamie's snakebite.





	Amputation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abreathofsnowandwaffles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abreathofsnowandwaffles/gifts).

> Based on a prompt from ages ago received in ImagineClaireandJamie on Tumblr. I'm so bad at AO3'ing that this is just now getting over here.

Jamie had asked for touch knowing that he was dying. In their bed, where he had asked to be, with his flesh cold except for where her fingers marched and stroked warmth, he _knew _that he was going to die. 

The certainty of it was in his words, his mannerisms, his very soul as it flickered light and dark behind his eyes. 

Of course he was well aware of her love for him after all these years. Here on the Ridge, he had known a love from her that he had never thought possible –– a true home, a domesticity, peace with his wife and their daughter, a grandson, a son-in-law. 

And knowing all of that love, the last thing he wanted was the _feeling_ of her loving him in the basest way possible. And she had.

For her part, Claire understood. 

At Wentworth, he had said that he would die without her touch. He had not needed to say it on the Ridge. _She just knew_.

The following morning when Jamie woke, a painful but not unwelcome surprise, Claire had leveled him with the same: _You thought you were dying when we brought you up here, didn’t you?_

He had. There was little to be said about it.

And so it should not have surprised Claire when Brianna, voice soft, asked as much from the doorway to their bedroom.

“Mama.” A choked, quiet sound that was not quite a cry. “Is Da going to die?”

It took a moment for Claire’s eyes to focus on her daughter (**_their_**_ daughter_).

Brianna was a silhouette of her father with more curves in the early evening light. Claire stilled her hand over Jamie’s heartbeat, the cool cloth she was using to wipe sweat from his chest dribbling water onto the bed. 

After a moment, she could neither bring herself to lie nor tell the truth, so she just stayed silent and resumed her task.

Claire chanced a look at her husband’s face – coated with a sheen of sweat, lips parted. Beneath the cloth she could feel his heart working overtime to keep blood moving through his slowly-decaying body. 

It was a marked turnabout from the night before when she _searched_ and _prayed_ to feel the pulse of life in her husband. Seeing him like this filled her with a different kind of fear than what she had experienced that morning –– a calm resignation at loss as she groped for a pulse, a breath, a sign of life in his too-still body.

It was not until Claire felt warm fingers curl around her shoulder that she realized Brianna had come into the room.

“You’re not doing well with taking care of _yourself_, mama.”

The statement was not a criticism; the statement was made of a single, irrefutable fact. Claire’s lips were chapped, her clothes loose-fitting, and her eyes rounded by a bruised hollowness of sleepless nights and unsatisfying day dozing. 

Truthfully, she could not bring herself to care about anything other than identifying a miracle of twentieth-century medicine here on the Ridge.

Brianna crouched and wrung a second rag out in the pail of water. She went to the other side of the bed. For a time, they were quiet, working in tandem until Jamie’s skin was as dry and clean as it would get from the bed bath.

This place was _awful_ and _dangerous_, even if there was a slow romanticism to the closeness and the earnestness with which they all lived. It was taking everything in Brianna not to gather up her baby, the broken-voiced man she loved, and get the hell out. But this was the place where her family was – Roger, Jem, her mother, the father who was still breathing.

“This leg…” Claire sighed, maybe to herself more than to her daughter. “I am worried that it might need to be taken off.”

Claire and Bree both glanced at Jamie’s face –– his lips turned in a slight grimace, his brows tight, and lines etched deeply at the corners of his closed eyes. 

It was apparent that he was not resting comfortably, that he _could not_ rest comfortably.

“It’s infected… and here we are again…”

“Again?”

Brianna gently swiped the cloth over Jamie’s forehead, cleaning away the slight perspiration collecting just above his eyebrows. Claire looked to be lost in thought –– eyes on Jamie but unfocused. Studying where she had been wiping, Brianna was struck by how _long_ her father’s eyelashes were – resting just along his high cheekbones in even spikes. It was an odd observation that made something stir in her belly. If he were to die, she wondered what she would never know.

Twining her fingers with Jamie’s, Claire leaned back and crossed her legs. Her voice was quiet. It was almost as though she worried she would infect her husband’s already fitful sleep with the telling of it. “Well, I told you in passing about Wentworth… about what Black Jack Randall did to him.”

Bree nodded, guts churning at the thought. Psychological torture. Physical torture. Randall’s predation on her father. The use of her father’s love for her mother as a bargaining for _what_ exactly? The sadistic joy of breaking a man.

It had always been a story told in snippets, but Brianna had always known there was something more.

Claire’s eyes fixed on the wound on Jamie’s leg for a long moment. It was gaping and raw, black at the margins and surrounded by a bloom of frightening discoloration. 

“The infection could consume his flesh overnight, tear through his muscle, leave us in a dire situation. If the infection makes it to his heart, his lungs…” Claire’s voice trailed off, her fingers winding tighter into Jamie’s as he stirred with a soft sigh.

She continued only after she was contented that he was fully under the spell of his own fevered dreams.

“This could go south very quickly. Things… _there_… almost did… go south that is.”

Neither knew then, but the stillness in her mother would haunt Brianna for days after the fact. It was the calm of someone who had made peace with a history that was truly horrible. It was a calm that could hide only the most abject of horrors. 

“He was broken, crushed after Wentworth. Soul even more so than body, and his body…”

The hitch in her mother’s voice betrayed an entire history that Brianna had never heard. Brianna stayed silent, knowing that her mother was thinking through what, whether, and how to _tell_ the memories that bookended this awful situation.

“His hand…”

Claire gently lifted Jamie’s hand, eyes focused like they were studying something her brain could already pluck from memory. To Claire, the memory was alive with sensory details.

Touch (_pulverized bone, slippery skin, floppy ligaments, skin tacky with sweat and gritty with flaky dried blood_).

Smell (_coppery blood, pus smelling like rotting hay, feces and sweat, semen and piss_).

Sight (_the love she had chosen, gone from unfocused and glazed eyes, the grease of an oily cross drawn by the Abbott’s fingers on Jamie’s forehead, palms, chest, and the arches of his feet, the desperate bravery in his eyes as he begged her to let him be done, to allow the life peel clean off of his bones_).

Taste (_the salt of her own tears and of the line of perspiration along her upper lip as she worked, the yellow flavor of bile as she retched in the hallway at the end of the surgery_).

And sound (_labored breathing, grunts and moans even under heavy doses of laudanum, the wrecked sob it took her a solid ten minutes to realize had come from her, not him)._

“The scars, they’re still there… the stiffness is still there. If only I’d had some more surgical training I could have spared––”

“Mama,” Bree breathed, feeling a burn in her throat, her eyes, her stomach. “Don’t.”

“I did what I could with it. The fingers were broken, one joint was _missing_. Randall. He used a mallet and he… _fuck_,” she breathed. “Randall, he cut your father… across his chest. And he licked the blood until he was clean.”

The image that Jamie had conjured that day as he confessed it to her –– the cat, licking clean a kill –– had stuck with her in the darkest of nightmares for years. Some nights she had to sleep on the couch when that particular moment crept into her slumber –– unable to reconcile in her reptilian brain that Frank and Jack Randall were not one in the same, despite their nearly identical faces.

Claire ran her thumb over the faint whisper of a scar curling over a gnarled second knuckle. 

“Afterwards, he gave your father liquor, helped him clean the vomit from his chin.”

Claire looked down at her feet where the damp cloth was hanging limply over the edge of the pail. She suddenly felt ill –– not like she was going to vomit or faint, but infected by such a tremendous thundering rage that she felt she would never see straight again.

“The amount of arthritis in this joint… the pain he must feel even now… it curdles my stomach.”

Thinking about what it did to his _mind_ was too much; it was easier (but by no means _easy_) for her to list what it did to his body.

Disentangling her fingers from Jamie’s, Claire leaned forward and pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. Her senses were betraying her –– her faculties of smell, sight, touch, hearing, and taste. None of those memories were things on the Ridge. _So why was she smelling, seeing, feeling, hearing, and tasting them_? 

Claire breathed deeply, the tang of sweaty bodies, the oaky odor of the wood floor and walls swollen with humidity, and the festering wound flooding her nostrils. It was a doctor’s curse to know the odor of certain bacteria by smell. This one was sweet and a bit like grapes overlaying rot, not like the infection reddening his flesh after Wentworth.

“I had to set them… shift the bones, get them back into line and under skin… sew him shut, wrap his hands.”

Claire shook her head, trying to right her mind, to tell it dispassionately.

It was a long time before Claire spoke again. Brianna had assumed that she was finished and had known it was not a time to ask questions. 

But Claire continued, a stream of words had been undammed and needed to run until the stream went dry.

“Jamie begged me to leave, to let him die. He thought it was over, that he could never touch me again. Randall… he… tortured Jamie. Using me. Touching him, evoking me. And Jamie demanded that I leave. He said that he could never see me the same way again.”

Brianna swallowed hard, having difficulty reconciling the man who was so passionate about her mother (_sometimes to an embarrassing extent_) with the one who asked her, no, _**implored**_ her to let him go.

“This leg… I can feel an amputation in my bones. It’s in my fingers, it’s in my wrists and my biceps. It’s in my mind. The effort of it, the force required to saw clean a leg. I know it so intimately. I cannot fathom doing that to him, but I might not have a choice.”

When Claire finally looked up, Brianna realized that her mother was crying. 

“He said not to take his leg, that I was to let him die. Even if he asked me to do it.”

It was a quiet sort of crying that just leaks and leaks silently. The kind where tears roll fat and hot, noiseless over cheeks and lips, dripping over chin and neck, collarbones and breasts.

“Bree… how can he ask me to do that? To let him die. Again. What do I do?”

Truly at a loss for words, Brianna rose and carefully wound her arms around her mother’s chest from behind. Claire sighed, pressing her face into her daughter’s arms.

Hours seemed to pass before she said, “I don’t know, mama.”


End file.
